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Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Imagine a big corporation. A
really big corporation that monopolizes everything and compels
you to buy its low quality overpriced services and imprisons you if you
refuse to pay whether you use them or not.

Now
imagine a CEO who picks and chooses which
laws to follow, who breaks the law, embezzles huge sums for his friends, lies
repeatedly and is never.held accountable for it.

We are all shareholders of the corporation of
government whose board and CEO we vote for, but whose undemocratic governing mechanisms make those votes less meaningful and many of whose shareholders are part of bloc votes that profit from the
unsustainable practices of the corporation and vote in bad
boards that rob us blind so that they can pocket more money.

The corporation's goal is to turn its shareholders into consumers; transforming free people into people who want free things so that the corporation of government can govern the people without being governed by them.

Once, Americans were shareholders of government. Today Americans are consumers of government. They aren't calling the shots; they're standing in line hoping for a special on health care in Aisle 1500.

The
current incarnation of the American Republic (is it the Fourth or the
Fifth incarnation? At least the Europeans have the good grace to tack on
those numbers) is primarily a provider of domestic services with a sideline in
international relations. This is a striking contrast from the older
American Republic where the government provided domestic defense and not
much else.

It's simplest to think of a thing in terms
of its function. With the majority of Federal spending going to Social
Security and Medicare, our government is essentially an insurance
company that takes a percentage of salaries and "invests" that money into a social safety net. Except the money isn't invested, it's
squandered, and much of it goes to people who are not paying into the
system.

As insurance companies go, our government is unreliable and untrustworthy, its payouts are
poor, its customer service is terrible and the people running it would
be in a jail cell if they were running a corporation the way that they run the country.

To
understand what our government is, imagine a wasteful non-profit
obsessed with Third World children, merged with some kind of domestic
poverty charity, merged with an insurance company, attached to a bunch
of umbrella trade and regulatory groups for entire industries with a huge
military arm that exists to stabilize troubled regions for the business
community.

This
Frankenstein America monster is what the current Republic looks like
and the people running it insist that this unwieldy beast, its bulky
body and its deviant brain, are a
massive step forward into the future. Well Dr. Frankenstein thought the
same thing and whether it's the Tea Party or OWS, there are no shortage
of peasants with pitchforks out there.

Our
national government is an insurance company attached to a
bunch of national and international trade and regulatory groups. It's a progressive mad scientist's dream of a government that can do anything.

But the monster performs its functions
like Frankenstein trying to take a flower from a girl's hand. The
flower gets crumpled and Frankenstein stomps off to smash things.

It
can't handle the insurance business, because it can't control the
temptation to spend all those piles of cash coming in.

It can't pay out
the money again, because it is determined to spend giant chunks of it on
social services to people who did not pay into it.

And it can't deliver
any services in an efficient manner because its departments exist to
employ incompetents who are bound by the rules to be even more
incompetent than their actual inclinations, so that the system will be
forced to hire even more incompetents on an annual basis.

As
for national defense, forget about it.

The military is lent out on a pro bono
basis to humanitarian projects maintained by NATO, which like an
international buggy whip manufacturer exists with no purpose and has
instead decided to go into the business of intervening to prevent genocides against Muslims that aren't taking place while ignoring genocides by Muslims that are.

The whole thing is rolled
into the United Nations, which is like one of those dot com companies
that were supposed to be the next big thing, but never became the next
big thing, but kept raking in piles of money from investors while
promising to one day revolutionize absolutely everything.

Think of the United Nations as Myspace. It's expensive, outdated and uses the same shade of blue. It used to be big, then it became irrelevant, but it still won't go away. The United Nations is also one giant walking and flying conflict of interest with countries using it to settle political scores with each other.

Our corporation's domestic programs, like its international ones, suffer from conflicts of interest.

First,
the corporation is far more beholden to its suppliers of services than
its consumers of services. This is a significant problem because it
means that the cost of providing those services is constantly becoming
more expensive and the corporation keeps nodding its head at the
inflated product and labor figures presented by its suppliers.

Between
the internal inefficiency and the unwillingness of the corporation to
hold the line with its suppliers, the financials are impossible, and the
corporation is currently running an annual trillion dollar deficit. It
keeps raising its compulsory prices, but there is no reason to think
that it can function within any conceivable budget because its boards,
its executives and its suppliers just adjust their spending to
match the available funds and then go twenty or thirty percent higher.

More
money doesn't mean better or even workable government. It means the
corporations and unions who are on the inside will take more money home
and next year there will be an bigger deficit, because like a dumb
beast, the system will eat as much as you give it. It will not stop,
because there is no profit motive for the individuals running things to
stop. They can only make money by spending money and they don't have to
make money to spend money because they control the cash flow..

On
paper, the corporation exists to provide services to customers. In
practice it exists to provide wealth to its boards, its suppliers and
its employees. It is a non-profit, in the worst sense of the word,
because its finances are unsustainable, it keeps going only by
compulsively lying to everyone it owes money to, promising debtors that
they will be repaid and customers that they will be served, while its
insiders stuff their pockets full of stolen money.

This
state of affairs is not unprecedented among corporations. It's a
familiar form of corruption being practiced on a truly epic scale.

Conflict
of interest is completely natural. It is human nature for people to
look after themselves and their friends first. It is also completely
natural for a system to serve itself and to build its governance
mechanisms in such a way that everyone on the inside gets paid and
almost everyone on the outside gets screwed. It's all natural, but so is
murdering your neighbor for his camels and his wife.

Governments
are set up to restrain the sort of natural abuses that flow out of
human nature. The American variety of it was an experiment that tossed
out a ridiculously corrupt system dependent on access and birth, and
replaced it with one that depended as little on government as possible.
It was still corrupt from the first, because it was still human, but it
was much less corrupt than all the other alternative systems to it
because everyone had limited veto power over it and unlimited immunity
from it in many areas.

Since then we have gone from a
system that limited its own power to a system whose ideologues cry for
unlimited power and spin us the wonders of universal college education
and green energy that they will produce for us if only we let them do
whatever the hell they want. But at least it's not one of those horrible
big corporations. Then we might actually have a choice whether to do
business with it or not.

In the ebb and flow of mankind's walk across the face of this planet, this story is merely a re-make of an old movie. Great empires fall because humans are terminally flawed and cannot govern themselves like the angels can. I pity the whole world when America ceases to be. The darkness that had risen is the worst in all the world's history. Our modern tools of weaponry shall make this planet a tiny place and no man will ever walk free upon it no matter how he fights. Fear not, says the bible more than 255 times. It will take the inner strength of a God to accomplish that task.

Goverment is simply a giant non-profit charity. One with a security arm, and the ability to force us to make "charitable" contributions. Like many bad charities, they spend most of their contributions on marketing, staff salaries, travel, etc., and very, very little on actually accomplishing anything.

It took peasants with pitchforks to stop Frankenstein and it will take the same thing to stop the current government juggernaut. The second amendment issue will resurface because the left knows that is the only thing that can stop them.